Oh, fuck off, you goddamned political hack. We were having a fun time making nerdy jokes about something as both grandiose and beautiful as the forming of a fucking star, and you have to bring your bullshit politics into it.

Seriously, do people like you ever relax? Ever joke around without dragging The Other Team into it? Do you realize you're the problem with the world, America in particular?

No, I don't really want to argue this with you. Nobody does. Nobody cares about you. So just sit your ass down, shut the fuck up, and enjoy the star being formed already.

I think the only logical conclusion is that you ALL need to take chill pills and go look at the pretty space pictures.

I think a more logical conclusion is that there are a lot of libertarians with mod points reading this thread. Look at who's getting modded "insightful" while others get modded "flamebait". Not that I'm keen on either of them.

This may be a naive question (and will almost certainly be derided as such). I remember from Astronomy 101, many years ago, the prevailing idea about stellar formation. But I don't remember anyone ever explaining studies that verify the hypothesis is valid. What I'm saying is that it's pretty obvious this is a star surrounded by a cloud of material (gas or dust, I can't remember), but how do we know the star is forming rather than, say, dying? Or are we just supposed to take it on faith because we read it in a book?

A related question-- this is an awesomely cool picture, but does it or does it not tell us much about how stars form?

We know from stellar nurseries we've seen elsewhere that the current model is largely correct. We know from spectrometry that the gas cloud is abundant in light elements and poor in elements that form in later-generation stars, and know also from spectrometry that the star itself is also very rich in light elements. Spectrometry, the the level of light given off, plus the estimated distance also tells us where in the sequence the star is, because the sequence is now very well known. We can further verify a few details -- the solar winds push gas away from the sun, but there are no solar winds before there's a sun to emit them. By measuring output and the degree of push, you can determine how long the gas cloud has been blasted at by the star. If this matches expectation, all's well. If the gas cloud shows evidence of more displacement than can be accounted for, there'd be problems. So far, all looks good.

So although the exact details of stellar formation do shift from time to time, major changes aren't likely. Minor ones, on the other hand, are commonplace. For example, some stellar nurseries close to the galactic centre are being hammered by solar winds from supermassive stars in the region. Current models cannot account entirely for how the stars were able to condense at all under such conditions. (You wouldn't expect fog patches to form in gale force 9 winds for the same reason. If you see fog in such conditions, then there's some extremely freaky condition to explain it - a total lack of air currents or turbulence is possible if you've exactly the right environment, and therefore something similar must exist in these freak star formations. It's an addition to, though, rather than a replacement of existing models.)

This is why you can find good deals on great astronomy equipment - also some cheap astronomy equipment, too...

People see these "color enhanced" or "artist's impression" pictures and go buy a telescope, eye-pieces, etc. Then go out on a clear night and besides Juper and Saturn, which are pretty cool to look at, are unimpressed with all the little brown-smudgies in the sky, which are most of what Hubble & Co. make such beautiful images out of.

I did exactly that. I love what I can see, but now I just want a bigger scope. [Insert beavis & butthead chuckle here]

It's called "Aperature Fever"

Behaviour typified by acquiring the largest telescope you can manage to fit in your car. Extreme affliction may lead to buying a bigger vehicle (and/or modification of existing vehicle) to accomodate very large scople, primary mirrors, counter weights, etc.

um... so grind your own mirror? Plans for homebuilt machines, blank glasses, and 1200 grit diamond polishing paste are relatively easy to come by. All you need is a garage you can fairly effectively seal and six months to do the actual grinding.

Yikes. Yeah I've watched a few videos on making my own. Even considered a few of those cool contraptions to make it easier. I just know myself... I think I'm better off saving my pennies and buying one from someone that knows what they're doing.

I have a telescope that, outside the moon, I can't really see much due light pollution, but can't stop to get amazed every time I see moon craters. Maybe the pictures are doctored but even so, I love to see beatiful pictures like these published. If I were american, I would feel enormously proud for stuff like this instead of the last bombing campaign of USAF or CIA.

Of course they would. They translate the x-ray or non-visible spectrum into a visible color scale, and play with it until it looks nice, then use photoshop and artistic license to come up with something to sell to the public.

They even admit it. The description on the video download page says:

This movie presents a visualization of the star-forming region known as S106. This unique three-dimensional view illustrates and emphasizes that many of the objects contained within astronomical images are not at the

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's my understanding that the colorful photos that you see from the Hubble are only pretty because it's been 'shopped like nobody's business. Sure what you're seeing is really out there, but it doesn't actually look like that... and if you were to be at a point in space such that your normal field of vision only envelops roughly the same area as what the photo contains, you would surely see similarities... probably enough to even make a strong connection between them... but not the vibrant colors that space photos so often contain. It is like the difference between a decorated christmas tree, and a decorated christmas tree with many hundreds of lights.

To continue the christmas tree analogy, what Hubble does for our eyes is a little like what some enterprising pixel-slinger might do for a person with some form of color blindness; sure, the viewer might not be able to distinguish between red and green (or blue and yellow) lights on the tree, but they can still be rendered using the available spectrum into something which conveys the beauty and complexity of the overall display.

That's more or less my understanding. The hubble sees far more of the EM spectrum than we can with our own eyes... and so they take the invisible frequencies and assign them to colors in the visible spectrum to produce a visually pleasing image, whereas if you were to actually see it with your own eyes, instead of the vibrant colors that you saw in the photo, it would probably look very dull and grey.

It's pictures that stunning that can tell us a hell of a lot about an object. An amazing amount of detail is in the colours, however assigned. The same can be said for radio images, where colours are assigned to relative frequencies in the image field - giving images like this [nrao.edu] shot of Messier 51 in hydrogen. Might just look like a blue blob to some but it tells a lot about the distribution of hydrogen we would otherwise miss - and assume it's uniformly spread relative to the density of stars in the cloud, w

While I certainly agree it shows information that is otherwise invisible, the problem is that it presents an image that doesn't reflect what people expect when they see a photo - which is a duplicate of what they would see if they could see it with their own eyes.

I get the same feeling when I'm swimming in Lake Michigan, the amoeba I see are nothing like the dyed prepped slide photographs seen in textbooks. And don't even get me started on those ghastly black and white electron microscopic photos of insect faces, the real ones are cutely colored with much less harsh contrast.

that's not true, a photo does NOT show what the human eye would see. The lens' altering of perspective and depth of field are different, even the size of the picture is different. The film or array's response to brightness and color are different. All photographs are thus a distortion of what would be seen, so there is really no valid complaint to make other than that of degree.

You are being pedantic. Nonetheless, I did not say that a photo shows what a human eye would see... I said it was a normal expectation that this was the case... or at least approximately so. You are welcome to dispute this point, if you wish, but bear in mind that the fact you would point out the assorted technical deviations that a picture has from what you normally would see with your own eyes strongly suggests that you might not exactly be within a tolerable sigma of what most people think in the fir

actually, I'm just hobbyist photographer, and I sometimes use the 35mm lens on 35mm camera that approximates human perspective and field of view.
sometimes I compare the picture with the reality for different lighting...amazing what our brain and memory accept as nearly identical

On that same line of thinking, I'd love to be able to see our Earth in the full range of the electromagnetic spectrum.

With broadcast transmission frequencies tuned out maybe.

I'd love to be able to see broadcast transmissions; perhaps with fancy glasses. Imagine seeing mobile phone towers, find a missing phone, see interference given by car engines, see locations of Wifi units, etc.

Of course, I'd want to be able to turn it off. Think of a virtual-assisted reality.

that's not lens flare, that is a common artefact in Cassegrain cameras because the secondary mirror is usually held in place by wires, which introduce diffraction patterns in the image. I'm still disappointed that they didn't use a glass plate* to hold the secondary but there again that would kill a lot of bandwidth for detection, so I can understand the decision to use wire.

*I have some camera lenses which are basically small Schmidt reflectors; they have secondaries held in place by corrective lens optics which reduce common mirror artefacts such as astigmatism, blooming, etc. I would use these as portable scopes but I don't have a full-frame DSLR body to hand... any donations greatly appreciated;) and if anyone has an Olympus OM digital back with at least 16MP true resolution they'd like to just, like, give away, I'll have your babies!

Sort of -- it would be possible to take them out, but as they saturated those pixels of the sensor, the only thing it would be possible to do would be to replace them with black, which isn't particularly more true than white. Anything else would just be Photoshop tricks, which are likewise not particularly true. As it is, they do provide some information, since their size is dependent on the brightness of the star.

But I don't quite see where the center or new star is. There is a bright star showing from a bit below the center but I think that is just a star behind it. Is there something I am missing that is obviously the "center"?

Now obviously this happened 2000 years ago, but does anyone know how long it will last/has been going on for?

In more general terms, I'd like to know whether they scan new parts of the sky periodically for changes, or whether they just concentrate on different parts of the sky and see what they see. For instance, if you could go back 2000 years (taking Hubble with you), would the image look similar? How static are these images?

My first guess would be millions of years, so when astronomers look in the sky and

So who is to say that these stars are not alive in the real sense, and that like a buttefly, at this great size, ends up being a cocoon like beast that emerges a different entity in the end....I am sure when another alien life form looks at us as bags of almost pure water, they might wonder how we are alive as they could not accept us to be alive upon their definition, but likewise, we look at these stars and planets in orbit and think they are just things, yet they could actually be primitively intelligent